


Mea Maxima Culpa

by a_mere_trifle



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Persona 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Madoka Magica Fusion, Confessional, F/M, Gen, POV First Person, Suicidal Ideation, Tragedy, and then things got worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29906601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_mere_trifle/pseuds/a_mere_trifle
Summary: The confession of Maruki Takuto, Magical Girl.
Relationships: Maruki Takuto/Rumi
Kudos: 6





	Mea Maxima Culpa

**Author's Note:**

> _mea maxima culpa_ : through my most grievous fault.

\--

It started... ha. It started with the birth of a broken universe. Beginnings are lies, like all the other stories we tell ourselves. But here; take my particular lies anyway. Maybe they’ll be of use. You’re certainly owed them. Or maybe I just want an excuse to say it all at last.

For me, it started with Rumi.

We were in the same school for quite some time before I noticed her. She was a year below me; I was the studious type, my nose always in a book, though my classmates sometimes liked to mutter it might be found elsewhere as well. A teacher’s pet. I had ambitions, you see. I wanted good grades for a reason. I wanted to help people. I wanted to save the world.

I walked right into a witch’s trap one day and found that someone already was.

Kaname Rumi. She was beautiful. She moved like a dancer, sword and dagger slicing through nightmares like they really were just dreams all along. Pink and red and purple, an outfit that betrayed a childhood watching Sailor Moon; ribbons and lace and the glitter of magic in her wake.

I was in love before I even knew her name.

She took me into her confidence, I took her under my wing. I helped her with the homework she had little time to spare; she took me along on her missions. Not that those were too frequent, in our area. I came along anyway. I didn’t like the idea of her fighting alone. And I knew myself for a coward, even then, but I thought I could be brave enough to fight for her. Kyuubey said he usually could only recruit girls, but once in a while, in a very long while, there was a boy with enough potential to be worth the risk of making an exception. I could be an exception. So if I was there, and something did happen-- I could keep her safe.

I didn’t know what I’d wish for, though. My mother was sick, but she had been for a very long time. I knew, I felt I’d always known, that she didn’t really want to stick around. She missed my father so dearly, and I hated the knowledge that I was holding her back. I couldn’t keep her here just for myself. And I had Rumi in my life. What more could I possibly need?

It went on for a while. She had a good run, for a magical girl. It seemed sustainable; it seemed we could go on like that forever. 

I didn’t know then that for the girls possessed by magic, there is no retirement.

We came home from a mission one day to find her parents dead in the kitchen.

A random robbery gone wrong. They were gone before we even got home, the blood... so much blood. The scent is with me still. The way she screamed and slipped and fell by their sides, shaking them, calling them back. I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe. I’m a coward, remember?

I called the police. I stammered half-lies to the policemen. I sat with her all night under the glare of the lights, the people and the paperwork and the slow ritual grind of it all. I tried to get her to sleep, tried to get her to eat, tried to get her to answer me.

She couldn’t have known, they told her. Couldn’t have done anything. They were gone surely half an hour before we got back. And what could two teenagers have done against armed men but die with them?

They left us alone. I whispered her name.

And I learned then where witches came from.

Darkness and static flickering around us. I could still hear her crying. I’d been in enough witches’ barriers by then to recognize what was being born around me, even if I couldn’t let myself understand. Kyuubey was beside me, then; that will come as no surprise. “Quick,” it said, “if you want to get out of this. We have to form a contract! Make me a wish!”

And I had a wish, by then; I called it out without hesitation. The words of my particular damnation: _“I want Rumi to be happy!”_

And so it was done. I woke up in my own bed. I hoped briefly it was all a dream, but I knew it wasn’t. I remembered the pain, like my body itself was being rewritten, something tearing asunder in my aching heart; and there was a soul gem, painfully like Rumi’s except for its snow-white glow, clutched in my hand.

I slipped it into my breast pocket and went to school.

And she was there. She was smiling. She was laughing. I wanted to join her, but some instinct held me back, even then. I heard a friend asking if she could go to the mall tonight. She said she could, but her grandmother would want her back for supper.

In a way, I had expected it. She couldn’t be happy in the reality we knew. Something had to give. But I hadn’t had a chance to think it through far enough to understand. I thought a lot, hard and carefully, through my classes that morning. I thought about what it would really take, to make her happy, after everything that had happened, and there was really only one question I had left, at the end. I gathered up the sad tatters of my courage at lunch.

“Kaname-san?” I asked her.

She looked up at me with a stranger’s eyes. “Sempai?”

I didn’t need to ask. With that word, I already knew. She didn’t remember me, either. “Sorry. My mistake. I had you mixed up with somebody else.”

It’s not an uncommon wish, of course, and not an uncommon consequence. I’ve been told many break right then and there, those who wished for their loved ones’ happiness and forgot to append a vital _with me_. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d never thought I’d see that look in her eyes again. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see her again at all. And the scent of blood was still with me.

I took the deal and called it a bargain.

And so I went onward, without her. I wasn’t much of a magical girl, and that’s not a joke about my gender; fortunately, there wasn’t a lot going on where I lived. I fought a few times, even won once or twice, but I’d learned enough by then to know that my talents and goals were different.

A magical girl who fell into despair became a witch. I didn’t realize yet that it was by design; I didn’t realize then that despair and death were the only ways out; but I knew that it happened, and I knew that I could prevent it. I could save them, these girls who put everything on the line for the sake of the people, for the sake of a wish. I knew it.

So I went to Tokyo, enrolled in university. I sought them out, those I could still save, though it was no mean feat. It was hard to get them to trust an older boy, and Kyuubey was strangely uncooperative. I realized slowly that the creature was obstructing me, spreading rumors and distrust, but it didn’t stop me. Nothing would stop me. It was something only I could do.

I found them, the girls on the edge of falling. I saved them, just like I’d saved her. They walked away from it all, with no memory of what they had been. Sometimes their friends hated me for it. Most agreed it was a price worth paying for their lives. Most of them were grateful.

I was doing what I’d always wanted to do, the hero I’d always wanted to be. I was happy. It was grueling work at times, to get close enough to earn their trust, to watch their suffering, to endure the failures and the deaths and the pain. But for what I was able to accomplish, it was well worth the price.

But then.

Eventually I figured it out.

I was fighting a witch with Kimiko-chan, a young teen whose taste ran to emerald and belts. I still wasn’t much of a fighter, but Kimiko-chan had no other friends, not other than Hime-chan; and I’d saved Hime-chan the week before. She was taking it hard. I was worried about her. Her fighting was sloppy; she seemed distracted by the figments around us, her head out of the game. I did what I could, but the witch was ignoring me, like the lack of threat I was, going after Kimiko-chan, always a step ahead, anticipating every move. It was on her, it caught her up in those crab arms, and she looked up into its green eyes.

“Hime?” I heard her whisper.

And it rammed her past its shark’s teeth, deep into its throat.

Something else about Kimiko-chan: she favored bombs. I stood there, useless and frozen, and she detonated in its chest, a flash of light and heat that knocked me to the ground. And they were gone, both of them, leaving me in reality, alone.

I ran. I scoured the records, I pored back over all my notes. The police scanner was on in the corner; Hime-chan’s parents calling the ambulance for their daughter, gone cold and unresponsive in the night.

Half the girls I’d saved were already gone. I’d been around so much death, so many disappearances, that I hadn’t kept track, it hadn’t registered as unusual. Girls died all the time, right? That was just how the world I was living in was. I stalked the other half, trying to find the answer, trying to see it in their eyes.

What was it I’d saved? What was it I’d brought back? Were they really themselves at all? Had they ever been? Or were they just a pale fascimile I’d created? How could I ever know? Kyuubey wasn’t reliable, and more to the point, it wasn’t talking. It just watched me, and smiled, with those lambent red eyes.

I couldn’t find out in Tokyo. I caught a train back home.

I watched her, living with her grandparents, working part time at a grocery store. She was happy; she smiled at everyone. She’d had so many dreams. She’d wanted to leave this town. Maybe she’d just changed her mind. Maybe I’d changed it for her. 

Or maybe the Rumi I knew was gone. Maybe the Rumi I knew had never come back in the first place.

In the alleys behind the grocery store lived a witch.

Rumi wanted to save everyone. Six people had gone missing in the past few years. She’d wanted to save everyone, and she was gone, a smiling mannequin in her place. A monster, eating girls alive, in her shadow. Not her shadow. The real her. Vengeful. Despairing. Alone.

And in that moment, I knew what I had done.

I could feel it starting. I’d seen it so often from the outside. I could feel my heart starting to crack. But I couldn’t become a witch. I couldn’t keep cursing people, any more than I already had. I couldn’t let everyone keep making the same mistakes over and over. Something good had to come out of this. It couldn’t be wrong to hope. It couldn’t all end in despair. For Rumi’s sake. For everyone’s sake. This wretched world, this wretched cycle. It couldn’t stand. I would break it all!

I had one chance. One moment. One idiot idea. A hideous risk, but no worse than I deserved.

I took my twisted power, and I turned it on myself.

I dissociated. I... tore. I fractured. How do I even try to describe it? Something deep within me broke, screaming, falling deep into darkness, into madness. Something else stayed on the surface, still afloat.

I went back to Tokyo, my tiny witch in tow.

I was still aware. I was probably still myself. It’s difficult to tell. I was so very numb. 

I couldn’t fight anymore, not that it was much of a loss. My magic was occupied elsewhere now. Could I still save anyone? At that point, why would I try? I knew full well how pitiful an excuse for a rescue it was, and if I tried, I risked upsetting the fragile equilibrium that was keeping me lucid, keeping the witch dulled, quiet, at bay. I didn’t know what it would turn into if I lost myself completely in it. And, as I have mentioned, I am a terrible coward.

So I went on. I got my degree. My witch was a small and quiescent thing. It stayed silent for a long time, lurking quietly in the back alleys. Once in a while, a lost soul in despair would drift into it. It gave them peace. It gave them something beautiful. They died painlessly, with such relieved smiles.

Oh, yes. I knew what it was doing. I knew its every move. I knew everything that happened within my Barrier. 

It couldn’t continue. I knew it couldn’t continue. I couldn’t bear to give up. 

I had to warn them. I had to do some good. There had to be a way. Even if thousands before me had tried and failed... there had to be a way.

I went into school counselling. I would find them before they fell, stop it before it started. It worked, once or twice, at least for a while. Was it worth it? It had to be worth it. The cost was getting higher and higher.

A girl drifted into my Barrier. All she wanted was an end. Her sister came to save her. She fought with ribbons and red and preternatural grace. She got her sister out alive. She fell behind. She fell prey. Ribbons and red. 

Her sister begged Kyuubey to bring her back. That was impossible, it said. “I want to trade my life for hers,” she insisted. And Kyuubey tilted its head, and acquiesced. She didn’t ask what the difference was. I already knew.

It was my first unwilling victim. It was when I truly knew I was spiraling out of control.

It couldn’t continue. I didn’t even know how to stop anymore. Not without making everything much worse. I wandered the streets alone, half hoping someone would come to end it for me. There was a witch being born in the alley, a beautiful girl with venomous eyes. She was screaming at Kyuubey, calling it a liar, a traitor, every name in the book. It sat there placidly. It had never _lied_. It had taken advantage of her, used centuries of wisdom against her, used the tropes and subconscious archetypes it itself had planted deep within us, but it had never strictly _lied_.

She spat at it, and cursed, and her magic lashed out, a vicious cutting thing; I wonder what her wish was. Kyuubey actually staggered under it, and as the girl fell into despair, I realized what she’d done. The Incubator shook itself. It was cut off from its hivemind. Alone.

What could I do, I’d wondered, that a hundred souls before me hadn’t tried?

One chance. One moment. One hideous idea.

I took the Incubator, and I turned my powers upon it.

Yes, it would drain my flagging resources, shatter my fragile equilibrium, but it was the only chance I had to change this, to save someone from this endless cycle, to do something, anything, _different_.

You’ve figured it out, now, right? 

My magic rippled through it, twisting it, erasing its memories, rewiring its mind. It wrenched itself away from me, darting away into the alleys of Tokyo, but I watched it, wanting to see what I had made. I watched as it spied on the city, saw what was happening, and set itself against it. But you can’t go against five thousand years or more of habit, can you? Not without knowing why.

Instinctively, it looked for people it could bestow its gift upon. It found a particularly brilliant young man in trouble, fierce and desperate and ready to burn all that he was in the name of his own justice.

It told you its name was Morgana, and it made you a deal. 

You know better than I what happened next.

And I’ve watched you, Amamiya Ren, as you built the Phantom Thieves around you; as you set yourself against the rot of this city, and the old conspiracies deeper than you could have dreamed. I’ve watched you build something amazing out of something obscene, and I’ve been wondering, for so long.

Have I empowered the best minds of your generation, the bright stars that can break us free of this once and for all?

Or have I damned all your beautiful spirits to the very same hell?

It’s out of my hands, now, either way, which is where it belongs. Honestly, it’s possible I’m just too far gone to care.

So this is what I leave you with; the final testament of Maruki Takuto. You’re beginning to piece it together even as you fight me. You’re amazing, each and every one of you. I don’t know if I’ve ever done anything right, not once in my life, but if I have, I think this is it. I think you’re it. And I know this is the right way for it to end.

Let Yoshizawa-san have her vengeance. Let you learn the truth, and use the hard-won wisdom better than I did. Let this twisted curse of an existence end. Let me do this one thing right.

Take the Grief Seed I’ll become. Use it without hesitation. I’d give anything and everything for any chance at saving you. That was always my wish. I beg you, Joker-- grant it. Don’t look back.

You told me once it was your turn on the stage, a world of secrets in your smile. Do you remember? I told you I was sure you’d take the world by storm. 

It’s up to you now, Joker. Break the chains of fate. Don’t ever give up; don’t ever give in.

May this world without salvation find hope through you at last.

\--


End file.
